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A shattered Axis plane fell out of the clear sky, spun a trail of smoke and plummeted into the Mediterranean. Away swooped its killer, Pilot Frederick George Beurling, of Canada. The name of the Axis pilot was not recorded. But he had this distinction: he was the 1,000th to fly to his fall over Malta.
The defenders of Malta chalked up his number last week as they fought off the latest all-out Axis onslaught. For five days swarms of Axis planes had swept over from neighboring Sicily, only 60 miles away. Somewhere in the Mediterranean, during the distraction, an Axis convoy had probably pushed through to North Africa with supplies badly needed by Rommel. But the Axis had paid heavily for the transports' passage. In the five days of almost ceaseless combat, Malta's ack-ack guns and the R.A.F.'s Spitfires had destroyed more than 100 Axis aircraft. This week Malta still stood, battered and bloody, with guns and planes ready for the next Axis raid.
No spot in the wide world has taken such sustained and savage bombing. To defend it the British have paid dearly. But still they cling. If the world wonders, the British have a twofold answer.
Malta is worth the price for strategic reasons. Sixty miles from Sicily, the island is a constant menace to Axis supply routes in the Mediterranean. She is a base for British submarines. She is a potential base for an attack on southern Europe. And deeper than practical reasons, she has become Britain's symbol of resistance, as Stalingrad and Bataan became symbols of valor to Britain's allies.
Knights of Malta. Largest of the five diminutive islands which cluster near the Sicilian Channel, flounder-shaped Malta is about 17 miles long, little more than nine miles wide. Steep cliffs rise out of the surf on her south shore; on her north, rocky boulders tumble into the sea.
Beautiful but arid, she has a strange attraction: almost every dominant power in the history of the world has, at one time or another, possessed her.
The Phoenicians first landed about 1450 B.C. For two centuries she was under Greek domination. Later she fell into the hands of Carthage. For some 700 years she was part of the empire of conquering Rome. After the decline of Rome, army after army crossed Malta, leaving their marks. Her gateway was scuffed by the feet of the world—Arabs, Normans, Sicilians, Germans, French, Spaniards—until Charles V. Holy Roman Emperor, ceded her to the pious, wandering Knights of St. John of Jerusalem.
The Maltese Knights held her against the Turks. She became the bulwark of Christendom against the Infidel, grew to be an even stouter bulwark when Grand Master Jean de la Valette Parisot built the fortress city which was named after him and which stands today on the north shore like an amber rock pile in the Mediterranean's sapphire sea.
In 1798 Napoleon arrived to loot the ancient rococo palaces and churches before he rushed on into Egypt. The French garrison held until 1800, when the English Fleet hove into view, anchored in Malta's deep harbors and took over the island.